Posts Tagged 'Risk Management'

Security breaches have made front-page news in recent months. With stories about Target, Neiman Marcus, Yahoo! and GoDaddy in the headlines recently, the importance of good information security practices is becoming harder and harder to ignore — even for smaller businesses. Moving your business into the cloud offers a plethora of benefits; however, those benefits do not come without their challenges. Moving your business into the cloud involves risks such as multi-tenancy, so it's important to be able to properly manage and identify these risks.

1. Know the Security Your Provider Offers
While some SaaS providers may have security baked-in, most IaaS providers (including SoftLayer) leave much of the logical security responsibility of a customer's systems to the customer. For the security measures that an infrastructure provider handles, the provider should be able to deliver documentation attesting these controls. We perform an annual SOC2 audit, so we can attest to the status of our security and availability controls as a service organization. With this information, our customers use controls from our report as part of their own compliance requirements. Knowing a provider's security controls (and seeing proof of that security) allows business owners and Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) to have peace-of-mind that they can properly plan their control activities to better prevent or respond to a breach.

2. Use the Cloud to Distribute and Replicate Your Presence
The incredible scalability and geographical distribution of operating in the cloud can yield some surprising payoff. Experts in the security industry are leveraging the cloud to reduce their patch cycles to days, not weeks or months. Most cloud providers have multiple sites so that you can spread your presence nationally, or even globally. With this kind of infrastructure footprint, businesses can replicate failover systems and accommodate regional demand across multiple facilities with the minimal incremental investment (and with nearly identical security controls).

3. Go Back to the Basics
Configuration management. Asset management. Separation of duties. Strong passwords. Many organizations get so distracted by the big picture of their security measures that they fail to manage these basic rights. Take advantage of any of your provider's tools to assist in the ‘mundane’ tasks that are vitally important to your business's overall security posture. For example, you can use image templates or post-provisioning scripts to deploy a standard baseline configuration to your systems, then track them down to the specific server room. You’ll know what hardware is in your server at all times, and if you're using SoftLayer, you can even drill down to the serial numbers of your hard drives.

4. Have Sound Incident Response Plans
The industry is becoming increasingly cognizant of the fact that it’s not a matter of if, but when a security threat will present itself. Even with exceedingly high levels of baked-in security, most of the recent breaches resulted from a compromised employee. Be prepared to respond to security incidents with confidence. While you may be physically distanced from your systems, you should be able to meet defined Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) for your services.

5. Maintain Constant Contact with Your Cloud Provider
Things happen. No amount of planning can completely halt every incident, whether it be a natural disaster or a determined attacker. Know that your hosting provider has your back when things take an unexpected turn.

With proper planning and good practice, the cloud isn't as risky and frightening as most think. If you're interested in learning a little more about the best practices around security in the cloud, check out the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). The CSA provides a wealth of knowledge to assist business owners and security professionals alike. Build on the strengths, compensate for the weaknesses, and you and your CISO will be able to sleep at night (and maybe even sneak in a beer after work).

The calls start rolling in at 2am on Sunday morning. Alerts start firing off. Your livelihood is in grave danger. It doesn't come with the fanfare of a blockbuster Hollywood thriller, but if a server hosting your critical business infrastructure is attacked, becomes compromised or fails, it might feel like the end of the world. In our Risk Management series, and we've covered the basics of securing your servers, so the next consideration we need to make is for when our security is circumvented.

It seems silly to prepare for a failure in a security plan we spend time and effort creating, but if we stick our heads in the sand and tell ourselves that we're secure, we won't be prepared in the unlikely event of something happening. Every attempt to mitigate risks and stop threats in their tracks will be circumvented by the one failure, threat or disaster you didn't cover in your risk management plan. When that happens, accurate event logging will help you record what happened, respond to the event (if it's still in progress) and have the information available to properly safeguard against or prevent similar threats in the future.

Like any other facet of security, "event logging" can seem overwhelming and unforgiving if you're looking at hundreds of types of events to log, each with dozens of variations and options. Like we did when we looked at securing servers, let's focus our attention on a few key areas and build out what we need:

Which events should you log?
Look at your risk assessment and determine which systems are of the highest value or could cause the most trouble if interrupted. Those systems are likely to be what you prioritized when securing your servers, and they should also take precedence when it comes to event logging. You probably don't have unlimited compute and storage resources, so you have to determine which types of events are most valuable for you and how long you should keep records of them — it's critical to have your event logs on-hand when you need them, so logs should be retained online for a period of time and then backed up offline to be available for another period of time.

Your goal is to understand what's happening on your servers and why it's happening so you know how to respond. The most common audit-able events include successful and unsuccessful account log-on events, account management events, object access, policy change, privilege functions, process tracking and system events. The most conservative approach actually involves logging more information/events and keeping those logs for longer than you think you need. From there, you can evaluate your logs periodically to determine if the level of auditing/logging needs to be adjusted.

Where do you store the event logs?
Your event logs won't do you any good if they are stored in a space that is insufficient for the amount of data you need to collect. I recommend centralizing your logs in a secure environment that is both readily available and scalable. In addition to the logs being accessible when the server(s) they are logging are inaccessible, aggregating and organize your logs in a central location can be a powerful tool to build reports and analyze trends. With that information, you'll be able to more clearly see deviations from normal activity to catch attacks (or attempted attacks) in progress.

How do you protect your event logs?
Attacks can come from both inside and out. To avoid intentional malicious activity by insiders, separation of duties should be enforced when planning logging. Learn from The X Files and "Trust no one." Someone who has been granted the 'keys to your castle' shouldn't also be able to disable the castle's security system or mess with the castle's logs. Your network engineer shouldn't have exclusive access to your router logs, and your sysadmin shouldn't be the only one looking at your web server logs.

Keep consistent time.
Make sure all of your servers are using the same accurate time source. That way, all logs generated from those servers will share consistent time-stamps. Trying to diagnose an attack or incident is exceptionally more difficult if your web server's clock isn't synced with your database server's clock or if they're set to different time zones. You're putting a lot of time and effort into logging events, so you're shooting yourself in the foot if events across all of your servers don't line up cleanly.

Read your logs!
Logs won't do you any good if you're not looking at them. Know the red flags to look for in each of your logs, and set aside time to look for those flags regularly. Several SoftLayer customers — like Tech Partner Papertrail — have come up with innovative and effective log management platforms that streamline the process of aggregating, searching and analyzing log files.

It's important to reiterate that logging — like any other security endeavor — is not a 'one size fits all' model, but that shouldn't discourage you from getting started. If you aren't logging or you aren't actively monitoring your logs, any step you take is a step forward, and each step is worth the effort.

Whether you're managing a SaaS solution for thousands of large clients around the world or you're running a small mail server for a few mom-and-pop businesses in your neighborhood, you're providing IT service for a fee — and your customers expect you to deliver. It's easy to get caught up in focusing your attention and energy on day-to-day operations, and in doing so, you might neglect some of the looming risks that threaten the continuity of your business. You need to prioritize risk assessment and management.

Just reading that you need to invest in "Risk Management" probably makes you shudder. Admittedly, when a business owner has to start quantifying and qualifying potential areas of business risk, the process can seem daunting and full of questions ... "What kinds of risks should I be concerned with?" "Once I find a potential risk, should I mitigate it? Avoid it? Accept it?" "How much do I need to spend on risk management?"

When it comes to risk management in hosting, the biggest topics are information security, backups and disaster recovery. While those general topics are common, each business's needs will differ greatly in each area. Because risk management isn't a very "cookie-cutter" process, it's intimidating. It's important to understand that protecting your business from risks isn't a destination ... it's a journey, and whatever you do, you'll be better off than you were before you did it.

Because there's not a "100% Complete" moment in the process of risk management, some people think it's futile — a gross waste of time and resources. History would suggest that risk management can save companies millions of dollars, and that's just when you look at failures. You don't see headlines when businesses effectively protect themselves from attempted hacks or when sites automatically fail over to a new server after a hardware failure.

It's unfortunate how often confidential customer data is unintentionally released by employees or breached by malicious attackers. Especially because those instances are often so easily preventable. When you understand the potential risks of your business's confidential data in the hands of the wrong people (whether malicious attackers or careless employees), you'll usually take action to avoid quantifiable losses like monetary fines and unquantifiable ones like the loss of your reputation.

More and more, regulations are being put in place to holding companies accountable for protecting their sensitive information. In the healthcare industry businesses have to meet the strict Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations. Sites that accept credit card payments online are required to operate in Payment Card Industry (PCI) Compliance. Data centers will spend hours (and hours and hours) achieving and maintaining their SSAE 16 certification. These rules and requirements are not arbitrarily designed to be restrictive (though they can feel that way sometimes) ... They are based on best practices to ultimately protect businesses in those industries from risks that are common throughout the respective industry.

Over the coming months, I'll discuss ways that you as a SoftLayer customer can mitigate and manage your risk. We'll talk about security and backup plans that will incrementally protect your business and your customers. While we won't get to the destination of 100% risk-mitigated operations, we'll get you walking down the path of continuous risk assessment, identification and mitigation.